-ONE OF THE REASONS GIVEN TO 'IRANGATE' INDEPENDENT COUNSEL LAWRENCE WALSH FOR WHY I QUIT THE PRIVATE SECTOR JOB IN 1981: I READ THIS (NOTE PARTICULARLY THE ANNOTATED PASSAGE):

Getting there

A leading U.S. authority on aging, Dr. Robert Butler of Washington, says there's no reason why people can't live to be a very ripe age indeed. "So far, we haven't found any biological reason not to live to be 110," says the gerontologist.

But with pollution, acid rain, crime and the neutron bomb, not to mention taxes, closing in on us, some days we feel we already have.

PLO made up of many faces and competing voices

Item: Faruq Qaddumi, alias Brother Abu a-Luti, following his visit to Moscow in Late June told a West German magazine: "We shall never allow Israel to live in peace. Every Israeli will feel that behind every wall there might be a guerrilla who is aiming at me...We shall never recognize Israel...In case all-out war broke out, we would be the allies of the Soviet Union, for we prefer to be friends of Communists than to be victims of the Zionists and the imperialist occupation forces." Qaddumi serves as the "foreign minister" of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

'Soviet treaty'

Item: Abu Iyad, head of the PLO's Security and Intelligence Department, in an interview with a Kuwait newspaper, Aug. 17: "If we had the capability to sign a treaty with the Soviet Union, we would have signed a thousand treaties. If we controlled land, we'd have allowed the Soviets a thousand bases, because we're dealing with a foe stronger than Israel--the United States."

Item: On July 29, Austria's Interior Ministry announced the arrest of two armed members of the Palestinian "Asifa" organization, thought to be planning to attack Chancellor Bruno Kreisky. "El Assifa" is the military arm of Al Fatah, the largest component of the PLO.

The men were given conditional prison terms, and expelled. The PLO representative in Austria, who met them at the airport in Vienna, was ordered to leave the country.

Item: Sa'd Sayvil, alias Brother Abu al-Walid, a military member of the PLO, said in a broadcast that in the two weeks of Israeli operations in Lebanon in July there had been 2,500 Palestinian casualties, mostly civilian. He said the Israeli forces lost 1,500 men.

Item: Ahmad Jabril, head of one of the most militant groups under the PLO umbrella called on Palestinians to return to Jordan (from which the PLO was expelled bloodily in 1970-71) and to carry on the anti-Israel war from there. The Palestinian military presence in Lebanon, he said, is "temporary," because it is a "secondary theatre." (At the moment, it's the only theatre.)

Item: Muhammad Dawud Awdah, alias Brother Abu Dawud, was shot and gravely wounded by three gunmen as he was leaving a hotel in Warsaw, Poland. He was carrying an Iraqi passport in another name. The PLO office in Warsaw said it did not learn of the attack, or even of his presence, until three days later, suggesting he was in surreptitious passage to another country.

Item: In a Palestinian camp in Lebanon, 4-year-olds, with wooden rifles, sing: "We're the fighters/Who will liberate/The land of our forefathers." They do not understand the words; an instructor says comprehension will come in a few years. These are some of the many faces of the extraordinarily complex, militant, often murderous and divided body we mistakenly regard as a coherent and united organization called the PLO. In fact, the PLO--formed in 1964 and headed by Yasser Arafat since 1968--is an umbrella that today very, very loosely covers nine larger organizations and a flock of minor ones, at times formed for one specific terrorist operation.

Main preoccupation

Arafat's main preoccupation has been with holding all these bands together, but it has been an all but impossible task. When the PLO was formed, its founder, a Saudi diplomat named Ahmad ash-Shuqairi, demanded that the Arab states allow it to function as a supra-national entity among the Palestinian refugees in every state, levy taxes on them and draft them into a Palestinian Liberation Army.

The Arab chiefs would tolerate no such rights. The most they would agree to was to have each state provide Palestinian recruits. This attitude has not changed. The result has been that most PLO factions today are directed, financed and armed by this or that Arab state.

The second largest segment under the PLO umbrella is as-Saiqa, whose brigade in Lebanon is a part of the Syrian army. Iraq controls at least three smaller factions, one of which, Abu Nidal, has long served as the gunslinger of the Iraqi cloak-and-dagger organization. Libya finances at least one faction. Saudi Arabia pays a $75 million subsidy a year to Arafat's own Fatah.

But, in fact, the reason each of the Arab nations feels it necessary to maintain its own factions is that none wants to see a united Palestinian state--militant, leftist, and able to drag the whole Arab bloc into a war against Israel at a moment it may think inopportune. This is why the sound you hear emerging from under the umbrella is a cacaphony. The PLO, for instance, agrees to a truce in Southern Lebanon--but an important faction at once rejects it.

Privately, the attitudes of the Arab states towards the PLO range from hatred to a desire to exploit it. Sudan this year expelled the PLO mission; Anwar Sadat drove it out of Egypt years ago; Jordan, which expelled it in 1971 after killing several thousand, controls it with a harsh hand. But, outwardly, they all pay lip service to the idea of a Palestinian state.

This month alone, Saudi Arabia and Sadat brought forth "peace plans" in which the Palestinians are given a key role. Saudi Prince Fahd proposed the Israeli withdrawal from all lands occupied in the 1967 war, recognition of the "right of 2 million Palestinians" to return to the home they left in Israel, payment of compensation to them, and the creation of a Palestinian state. Fahd's formal statement very carefully omitted mention of the PLO. Sadat proposed U.S. contacts with the PLO--but dismissed Fahd's plan as "old hat."

PLO 'albatross'

This inability of its Arab "friends" to agree is an albatross the PLO cannot shed. Its factions issue statements, engage in terror (often against each other), wage war, compete for the loyalties of Palestinians in the camps maintained by the United Nations, run sabotage training centres. None suffers from lack of funds, for the patrons are generous at least with cash and guns.

All of them--rightists and neo-Marxists, "legitimists" and terrorists--are children of Palestinian nationalism which, contrary to Israel's official view, is as alive and militant as Israel's own.

The Palestinians cannot be ignored if peace in the Middle East is to be assured. But it will not be won so long as the PLO remains the creature of many competing patrons who want it housebroken.

(excerpt from August 21, 1981 Toronto Star)

- WAIT! DON'T GET JUDGMENTAL UNTIL YOU ALSO SEE THIS.

-HEY! DOESN'T SURFING THIS WEBSITE POINT OUT TO ALL BUT PERHAPS THE "INVINCIBLE IGNORANT" THAT THIS IS NOT AN ISOLATED CASE OF WHAT KIND OF FUTURE KIDS ARE BEING OFFERED?
WELL, YES.
TRY HERE AND THEN COME BACK HERE AND TRY HERE.